Meta (<meta>)

When to use 

The <meta> element is used to provide meta data for the website that gets used by for example search engines and web crawlers. ²

Rules

• There is not much that the <meta> element can provide to increase accessibility. That being said, if wrongly configured it can decrease the site‘s accessibility. Following are a few considerations that should be followed, when using the <meta> element:
  • Disabling or heavily restricting website zooming via the name="viewport" together with either content="user-scalable=no", content="maximum-scale", content="minimum-scale" attributes violates the WCAG 2.1 Guidelines. ²
  • The http-equiv="refresh" attribute together with content="<number of seconds>" can be used to automatically refresh the page or redirect to another page. Avoid doing so automatically, and if absolutely needed make sure to comply with the WCAG 2.1 Success Criterions that are linked to this paragraph. ^{3 4 5}

Sources 

1. MDN: <meta>: The metadata element by Mozilla contributors is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.5
2. W3C: Resize Text (Level AA) by Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG) Participants is licensed under W3C Document License
3. W3C: Interruptions (Level AAA) by Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG) Participants is licensed under W3C Document License
4. W3C: No Timing (Level AAA) by Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG) Participants is licensed under W3C Document License
5. W3C: Change on Request (Level AAA) by Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AG WG) Participants is licensed under W3C Document License